


took a market of filth and sold it like summer

by sidonay



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:45:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: The first thing that Dan Egan hears out of the mouth of New Hampshire Congress Candidate Jonah Ryan is:“Who the fuck are you?”Apparently, no one had told Jonah that he was getting a campaign manager, shipped direct to his doorstep from D.C.





	took a market of filth and sold it like summer

**Author's Note:**

> I started working on the third fic in the Disclosure series a couple weeks ago (and don’t get too excited, Only Person Who Remembers That Series, I’m about 95% sure that—if I do finish it—it won’t see the light of day) which sort of snowballed into me rewatching the first four seasons of the show and getting way too attached to both Dan/Jonah and Jonah Ryan.
> 
> I really wanted to write something and, surprisingly, I had a lot of ideas but for some reason this is the one that came to fruition.

**I.**

The first thing that Dan Egan hears out of the mouth of New Hampshire Congress Candidate Jonah Ryan is:

“Who the fuck are you?”

He’s sitting all long-limbed and slightly rumpled, the white sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, his red tie askew and glasses Dan knows aren’t likely prescription sliding slightly down his nose. There’s a pen in his fingers and he’d swung around to face the footsteps in the bare offices his campaign had taken over, the plastic tap, tap, tapping against a thumbnail but he’d stopped when Dan walked in, tracking cold, dirty water along the beige-speckled tile floor.

Apparently, no one had told Jonah that he was getting a campaign manager, shipped direct to his doorstep from D.C. Either that or he was told and he hadn’t listened which was also entirely possible—they hadn’t met before but Dan had watched the b-roll footage commandeered from the daughter of the President who was filming a documentary for school (why she needed to be here, recording anything having to do with this guy was beyond Dan’s understanding but she claimed it was _important to the story_ ) and this guy had some serious issues, which mostly boiled down to a hair-trigger temper and awful general comprehension skills.

He’d examined Jonah bursting into the room with the focus group scrutinizing his axe-swinging, wood-chopping, plaid shirt ad, shouting and pointing his finger, his politician uncle and his Director of Communications following, trying to calm him down. Dan had seen it about five or six times, only two of those because he was told to, the others simply for his own amusement. _Jesus Christ_ , President Meyer had said with clear derision, _this is the guy we have to get elected?_

They needed someone on their side. There were other Congresspeople who they knew would vote for them, carry them on through this ridiculous process (electoral tie, for crying out loud, it hasn’t been a thing in over one-hundred years) but it wasn’t going to be enough and too many of the others were unpredictable. There was an election in New Hampshire thanks to a dead man and they only had to get one of them situated and manipulated into office, tied nice and tight around their big fuck you finger.

Research had been done and research had landed on Jonah Ryan. Nobody seemed to be clear on why he was running—maybe because his uncle wanted family in a position of power and Jonah was his only option. Maybe Jonah just simply decided himself that he was going to do this because of some sort of stupid idealism. Or he just wanted to and was just privileged enough to get what he wanted. Either way, Dan would have to figure out which one it was and how to spin it in the most positive light he possibly could.

“Dan Egan,” he says, adjusts the bag weighing down on his shoulder. It smells like bad cologne and stale coffee in here. Catherine is lurking in the back, camera pointed at him and he tries not to stare directly into the lens. “I’m your campaign manager.” Jonah’s mouth pulls into a frown.

“I feel as if this is something I should have been made aware of,” the man Dan has learned to be Richard Splett, the aforementioned Director of Communications says. He’s sitting behind a cluttered desk that’s a little too low to the ground but the short chair he’s perched on is making up the difference, just a bit. Dan ignores him, keeps his gaze fixed down on Jonah, who’s staring back at him, his brow now furrowed as he thinks.

“Alright.” He doesn’t ask where Dan came from, why he just walked in and announced his position. “Well. Just give me a rundown of your experience and qualifications and we’ll go from there.” He sounds smug and Dan hates it immediately. Hates _him_ immediately.

“I’m not doing that,” Dan shoots back and Jonah blinks back at him in surprise. “I didn’t say I was _applying_ to be your manager. I said I was.”

“I. Uh…” is all he gets in response.

“Right. Exactly.” Dan gives the space a quick once-over. There are desks placed haphazardly with mis-matched chairs, old laptops and a goddamn _desktop_ running noisily. A coffee machine sits on top of a sagging file cabinet, papers that appeared to have already been here when they moved in tacked up to a line of corkboard stretched across one wall. Everything is washed in a pallid fluorescent light. He’d been pretty sure Jonah’s uncle was bankrolling this whole endeavor but the current state of his headquarters said otherwise, unless it was a deliberate attempt at appearing Just Like Everyone Else. (Not as if his potential constituents couldn’t just do a neat little web search and find out he came from low-tier but still too much money.) There’s a banner stapled above the large windows of the only actual office on the floor and Dan snorts. “I don’t know who Jon H. Ryan is, but you’d better tell him you're squatting in his base of operations.” He gestures at the sign and Jonah turns just enough in his chair to stare at it. “Or fire whoever came up with that.”

“You said that was a good fucking design,” Jonah says to Richard, who purses his lips and then wrinkles his nose.

“At the time it was,” Richard replies, “But yes, now I’m seeing how it could be interpreted as such.”

“You need help,” Dan says, stopping this conversation before it could continue.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” Jonah says.

“Nobody _asks_ for my help,” Dan responds. “I show up where I’m needed. And I’m _always_ needed.” It sounds absurd the moment it leaves his mouth and he inwardly cringes; he’s written far better material than that before. He’s also feeling these days that that’s not entirely as true as he used to convince himself that it was when he first started dipping his toes into politics but that is neither here nor there and has nothing to do with the matters at hand. He keeps talking before Jonah has enough time to respond. “I’m going in there." He points at the closed-off room. "Give me half an hour and then we can get started.”

“But that’s my office…” He hears Jonah complain as he walks towards it and he opens the door, purposely slamming it shut. Dan considers closing the blinds for maximum effect but changes his mind and just sits down, swinging his bag onto the desk. There’s a tiny television in here perched on a cabinet that someone had left on but all it’s giving him is static.

He snoops while he’s there, digs around in the desk drawers, finds a few energy bars—some intact, some just empty wrappers—and stacks of empty post-it notes, a heavily wrinkled piece of paper with loopy, illegible scrawl as if Jonah had tried to throw it away and someone decided it was worth holding on to, a stress ball that looked as if it had been squeezed too hard too many times, an actual, honest-to-god CD titled ‘HYPE MIX’, and stuck to the bottom of the top left drawer was a fortune from a cookie that read _your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded_. It’s worn, as if it had been around for a long time and Dan would almost assume that it had come with the furniture if the thing didn’t have the initials ‘J.H.’ written on the back in faded ballpoint, right under the date ‘4/16/1998’.

It’s seventeen-years-old. Not even old enough to vote yet, funnily enough. It’s also kind of sad and not exactly in an endearing way. Then again, it could be useful as a story if Dan could worm it out of him (and if it wasn’t a good one, they could just make one up), something to frame like a store’s first dollar.

He feels like he’s being watched—and not just by Catherine—and Dan looks up to see Jonah doing a terrible job of glaring at him through the blinds, his figure cramped behind a metal desk. Dan plasters on a fake grin, bares his teeth.

Jonah clearly didn’t want him here but that was fine because Dan didn’t particularly want to be here either, stuck in the land of perpetual snow and grey skies and people who only showed up at the polls because they didn’t have anything better to do on a Tuesday.

He wanted to be at home but he wasn’t and, since he was stuck here, he figured he might as well get this guy a win.  


**II.**

The woman that Jonah is running against is an eighty-something-year-old widow of the state’s current (now previous) Congressman, who apparently on his deathbed asked her to carry on his legacy. He couldn’t just give her the job on a silver platter but a lot of people thought that he had anyway once they saw the competition. Dan didn’t necessarily fault them for that particular opinion; he’d been in the guy’s presence for less than a week and he already felt his heart-rate skyrocket pretty much every time that he opened his big mouth.

That being said, there was definitely _something_ about him that seemed to work if his oddly high approval ratings had anything to say about it. They weren’t nearly anywhere as large as they needed to be for him to win but they were better than Dan anticipated when he first arrived.

( _What can I say_ , Jonah had said, spreading his arms to reveal a wingspan that could give a hug to semi-truck, _people love Jonah Ryan_.

 _No_ , Dan had replied, _they tolerate him. People love Judy Sherman and some mysterious candidate named Jon H. Ryan_.)

It’s 11:30 in the morning when Dan meets Jonah outside of a local diner on a rainy Thursday. They needed him out with some real people. Glad-handing. Smiling. _All that bullshit,_ Dan had told him the night before over the phone as he sat on the scratchy hotel blankets tossed over a mattress with a misshapen dent right in the middle (this, remarkably, was one of the _nicer_ places in the area; he didn’t want to know what the scumbag motels were like but he imagined it involved a lot of blood and body fluids that hadn’t been cleaned in decades). _The seniors have huge Viagra boners for Judy. We’ve got them to get ‘em up for you instead._ There’s a photographer with them, some kid borrowed from the town’s paper; he looks like he probably still lived at home, had acne littering his chin under wisps of beard hair and a permanent bored expression but the camera that was hanging from his neck was impressive and he didn’t talk to Dan which, in his book, was a huge bonus.

Jonah is five minutes late and Dan watches as he unfurls himself from the backseat of some ungodly cube-like vehicle that had pulled up onto the curb to deliver him here. He doesn’t recognize the driver—probably some intern they’d pulled off the streets to fill the spaces in the day-to-day—and they drive off to find a parking space the second Jonah’s feet touch the sidewalk, barely giving him enough time to close the door. He yells a string of expletives at the retreating car and Dan eyes the photographer. He’s red in the face but that could just be a skin condition Dan hadn’t noticed before.

“Great first impression, Frankenstein,” Dan says through clenched teeth.

“We gotta get rid of her,” Jonah says. “She has a _serious_ fucking attitude problem.” Which Dan already knew translated into: Jonah said something shitty to her and she didn’t cow to it. ( _This guy’s a mess_ , Dan had said to Amy—one of his co-workers and the closest thing he had to an actual friend—two nights ago, _he clearly knows what he’s talking about but he’s got the personality of a wet paper towel and that's an insult to the towel_. Amy had told him that Jonah sounded like a dream all things considered which wasn’t what Dan wanted to hear even though, secretly, he knew she was right.)

“Sure, yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Dan says. (He won’t.) “Come on. Let’s go eat some shitty pancakes and introduce yourself to normal people.” He puts a hand on Jonah’s elbow to get him moving but Jonah doesn’t, not right away, instead looks down at the fingers barely touching him and then up the arm they’re attached to until he fixes his gaze on Dan’s face. “What?” _Please, god_ , Dan thinks, _don’t let him be one of those ‘don’t touch me’ kind of lunatics_. Jonah says nothing though, reaches over to push the diner door open, the bell attached by a frayed piece of string jingling with the movement.

The food is just as terrible as Dan expected it to be and Jonah almost has a toddler-style meltdown when, of all things, the waitress brings him his plate and there’s a fruit salad on the side but he also makes a few people genuinely laugh when he shakes their hand and only accidentally curses once when talking to a young woman with no sense of humor which, honestly, counts as a win.

“If that’s the food I’m going to have to eat every day,” Jonah says as they’re walking out, “I’m going to turn bulimic.”

“Ignore that,” Dan says to the photographer. He may just be taking pictures but he still worked for a newspaper and it would be easy for him to sit down with one of their writers and tell them everything he’d witnessed in those couple hours following them around. Catherine, thankfully, wasn’t there but she also had a way of blending in and turning invisible even if she was standing right in front of you. She’s heard worse, though, which didn’t really make Dan feel much better about anything.

**III.**

The town hall is packed with badly dressed people drinking warm soda from plastic cups that rested on plastic table-clothed-covered tables with legs that had to be unfolded in order to set them up and they love every word coming out of Judy Sherman's little, wrinkled old woman mouth. The lights directed towards the stage are too dim but also, somehow, unbearably hot—Dan can feel them from where he and Jonah are standing, waiting in the wings for Jonah’s turn to speak.

“You have ten minutes,” Dan reminds him. Jonah has a small pack of paper index cards clutched in one big hand, bent in the middle from where he’d been holding on to them too tightly and Dan couldn’t tell if it was out of nervousness or not. Earlier, while he’d been talking to the guy who was running this whole gig—when he was only half paying attention to the answer to a question he’d asked—he'd caught Jonah out of the corner of his eye, pacing slightly, shiny shoes shuffling along the shellacked wooden floor, his mouth moving as he quietly read the cards to himself, the hand not holding them gesticulating to an invisible crowd. He seemed to be stuck on one card in particular and Dan couldn’t lip read but he’d heard (and used) the word ‘fuck’ enough in his lifetime to know what lips looked like when they said it.

It didn’t appear to be directed at the material but at himself instead.

“I know,” Jonah says and then clears his throat. “So. Dan. Listen, I—” He doesn’t continue, Dan’s phone trilling in his jacket pocket cutting him off and Dan glances at the caller ID, feels an icy pain stab him in the chest. He swipes at the green icon even though every fiber of his being is telling him not to do it.

She chews him out for a solid minute and a half, insulting him, but it’s the remark about him _fucking everything up again_ that sends him over the edge and he tastes aggravation and panic in the back of his throat. He can see Jonah’s face during the whole one-sided conversation and the clear shifts in his expression clue Dan into the fact that—despite the cheering and blah blah blah from the room behind them—the President is loud enough that Jonah can hear everything.

There’s astonishment when Dan addresses the person on the other end of the line but it morphs into confusion and then, curiously, melts quickly into what Dan realizes is anger and doesn’t move on from there. After she hangs up on him, Dan rants about her to the tune of applause and crackling, copyright free music coming over old speakers, uses indignation to cover up the weight of anxiety in his stomach.

“Her entire presidency has been one disgrace after the other,” he says, acid in his voice. This is dangerous and he knows it—they’re supposed to get this guy on her side, get him to vote for her when the time came but he’s not exactly selling her virtues right now. “And I’m bad at my fucking job?!” He laughs and it sounds just on the edge of maniacal. “ _Fuck_.”

“You know what?” Jonah says, stepping closer to Dan, closing the gap between them. He’s towering over him at first but then he bends down, hunches his shoulders so they’re face-to-face, like he’s trying to make sure that Dan will actually look at him. “That’s bullshit. You’re doing a good job.” It’s a complete one-eighty from the person who clearly didn’t want him there when he’d arrived two-and-half weeks ago.

“Fuck off,” Dan replies on instinct. He hasn’t known him long but it was long enough; it had to be a jab, a kick while he was down that was going to spin off into a comment that would end with him going back to D.C. and getting replaced. But when Jonah responds, there’s something earnest in his tone.

“No. That diner shit? The ‘meet the normals’ crap we've been doing? That was dope. It made me look good. That was a great idea.” Dan had been staring past Jonah during that whole thing, watching Judy as she waved and made promises and talked about her poor, dead husband but when Jonah stops talking Dan returns his attention to him and thinks he can feel his heart just about stop for half a second. Jonah’s looking pointedly at him and his face is such a goddamn open book, the lines printed with guilelessness and something else (he was usually so good at reading people but now he’s coming up empty; this is either an expression he’s never seen before or one he has and his brain is purposely refusing to understand it). For about three seconds every other sound around them drops away and Dan swallows. He feels a smile trying to push its way out of him and he can only manage to force it away just slightly.

“Go fuck yourself,” he says finally but it’s clear as day to the both of them that there's very little malice in it.

“Good luck,” Judy Sherman says as she passes by but neither of them reciprocate her goodwill and they hear her _tsk_ at them as she’s making her way backstage.

**IV.**

Jonah kisses like he’s hungry for it. He holds on to Dan like he thinks he might float away if he lets go.

They’re in the back of the slick, black car that Dan had rented to make Jonah seem a little more _professional_ and _put together_. Richard had driven them here but they’d left him in town hall making small talk on Jonah’s behalf and he’d seemed happy to do so—although, he seemed happy to do pretty much anything.

“You’re one of the worst people I’ve ever met,” Dan says from where he’s positioned on top of him, his sweat-sticky hands braced against the seat above Jonah’s broad shoulders.

“Fuck you, Dan,” Jonah hurls back breathlessly, fingers clenched firmly on Dan’s waist.

“Shut up,” Dan says, as if he hadn’t been the first one to speak, and then kisses him again.

**V.**

“Congratulations,” Amy says from where she’s standing beside Dan, the crowd of Jonah Ryan supporters crushing in against them on either side even though they’re right up against the stage and sending off clear _leave us alone_ signals. She’d swooped in during the homestretch, wouldn’t explain why to him, claimed it was because—despite the surge of popularity since he’d arrived—she could tell Dan needed help to get it the rest of the way there. Jonah had been perturbed at first but, after a couple of days and more than a few shouting matches, the three of them found out that—even though they didn’t necessarily get along in the ways people would expect them to—they worked almost uncomfortably well as a unit.

(Dan hadn’t told her about them hooking up—he probably would have under any other circumstance but things were so hectic by the time she got there that it kept slipping his mind—but then she’d walked in on them. She’d started out by laughing, calling them both unbelievable, saying she honestly wasn’t surprised, and then finished by saying he was lucky Catherine had flown back to D.C. for the weekend to get footage of last minute hysteria from her mother leading up to the vote because she _definitely_ would have wound up filming this otherwise, whether they were aware of it or not.)

He watched Jonah hobble up the short staircase to the podium, a crutch under one arm, his right foot heavily bandaged from his accident a few weeks ago where he was trying to impress during the filming of a campaign ad and wound up quite literally shooting himself in the foot. He’d said some things to Dan while hopped up on pills during a moment where Richard had gone to appease the reporters and Amy had disappeared to find some real coffee and not whatever sludge was being offered from the machine in the waiting room. He’d said some things that couldn’t be taken back, things that Dan was going to remember no matter how much drinking he did afterwards, things Jonah clearly had no recollection of because nothing about his behavior changed once he was released from the hospital.

“He’s a disaster,” Dan tells her, raises his voice to be heard over the noise, his phone lifted in his hands, recording this moment even though he wasn’t sure why—proof, maybe, to show the President that he knew what he was doing, that the panic attack he’d had while running her campaign was just a bump in the road. _You can have faith in me again. Look what I can do._ “He actually cares, kind of, for some ungodly reason. But he’s a fucking mess. I don’t think we’ve done America any favors.”

“You did Selina a favor and that’s all we needed him for,” Amy replies and Dan laughs but even to himself it sounds hollow and he’s not sure how he feels about it but it’s definitely not good. “Oh my god,” he hears her say and he turns to glance down at her, sees her balking at him. “You caught _feelings_.”

“What? No I didn’t. Fuck you.” The easy out. When faced with a truth he isn’t ready to hear, brush it off with obscenities. Dan Egan does not ‘catch feelings’. He doesn’t know what happened here in New Hampshire, somewhere he hadn’t wanted to be trying to get some starry-eyed douchebag put in a position of power just so he could further the career of his own boss, but there were no _feelings_ involved.

Except then Jonah looks down at him from the stage, having gone completely off-script for his victory speech, letting an inane drivel pour from his mouth, drivel that would get him in trouble if he was important enough for the media to notice. He looks down and smiles and points Dan out in the most inappropriate way possible, to which Dan responds with a middle finger, holding it up without thinking because _fuck him_ he _hates this fucking grinning, hopeless asshole_ who almost dropped a baby and then made an awful joke about broken eggs, who nearly came to blows with someone that shouted at him for having a weirdly-shaped body, who had to keep telling people that _no_ his name wasn’t Jon H. Ryan, someone fucked up but he was too stubborn to get it fixed even though he could afford it.

He hates this same guy who told Dan he was good at his job and meant it when he said it, who fumbled pretty much every social encounter but came out the other side unscathed about fifty-percent of the time, who verbally stood up to the man who had sexually assaulted him (something Dan didn’t know about until the night of the meet-and-greet at the bowling alley where he stood off to the side with the rest of the campaign team and had watched Jonah call him a _bully_ and say that he wasn't intimidated anymore), who had a shitty mix of metal songs that was supposed to make him feel better and a threadbare fortune cookie that reminded him that his talents would be recognized and suitably awarded.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

**VI.**

One of the last things Dan Egan hears out of the mouth of New Hampshire Congressman Jonah Ryan is:

“You’re gonna miss me. Parts of me, anyway.”

“I’ve already forgotten you,” Dan lies as he opens the door to taxi that’s going to take him to the airport. He immediately steps into a puddle that soaks his pant leg. Jonah looks hurt for the briefest of moments but then he smiles.

“You’ll come crawling back. They always do.”

“Dream big,” Dan says, shaking his foot to clean it but the movement is only making it worse. Somehow, this feels like a metaphor and he doesn’t like it.

“I did,” Jonah says. “And I fucking won.”

“You are literally—”

“—The worst person you’ve ever met,” Jonah finishes for him. It’s not the first, nor the tenth, time he’s heard it. That probably means something, too. And not what Dan wishes it did. “Sure. That wasn’t what you were saying last night when I had you—”

Dan was in the process of climbing into the vehicle while Jonah was talking and slams the door in his face, the rest of his sentence muffled. As the car is pulling away from the curb, his phone rings and he answers without looking at who was calling him.

“Bye, Dan,” Jonah says. Dan looks out the window to see him with his cell to his ear. He waves.

“Fuck off,” Dan says with what he realizes with mounting horror is complete affection. 

He hangs up without another word and the car takes him away.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually kind of liked the idea of Jonah running for Congress, it was just a shame that they had to do it during the season when his character got screwed up by the writers (although, as much as I like season 4, I would argue that it _actually_ started then but that's a whole discussion for another day.)
> 
> I'm @bugalvey on tumblr if you want to come say hi.
> 
> title from "the good, the bad and the dirty" by panic! at the disco.


End file.
